This luxury monograph focuses on Xavier Veilhan's Architectones project, a series of interventions started in 2012 in which the artist invests major modernist's architectural sites.
This multi-layered book focuses on an innovative exhibition and event series that both celebrates the major American and European works from celebrated French artist Xavier Veilhan and gathers anecdotal and historical documents of many of the greatest domestic and private spaces of modern architecture.
Veilhan returns with
Architectones to his favorite non-traditional exhibition format—site-specific works in architecturally-significant spaces. Following solo showings at the Palace of Versailles and The Phillips Collection, with this project the artist takes on the specters of modernism, altering the buildings temporarily through sculpture, music, light, and the interaction between site and guests. Seven installations occupied classic buildings between 2012–2014: Richard Neutra's VDL Research House (Los Angeles), Pierre Koenig's Case Study House No. 21 (Los Angeles), John Lautner's Sheats-Goldstein Residence (Los Angeles),
Le Corbusier's Cité Radieuse (Marseilles),
Paul Virilio and Claude Parent's Sainte-Bernadette du Banly (Nevers), Konstantin Melnikov's Melnikov House (Moscow), and, finally, Mies van der Rohe's Pavilion (Barcelona).
This publication is an extension of the Architectones project itself. It documents these short-term, ephemeral installations with photographs and shares the artist's writings, plans, drawings and technical specifications for each structurally impressive work. The book's design reflects the refined aesthetics of Veilhan's own practice. The oversized format features layout and type treatments inspired by the clean and classic sensibility of architectural project documents.
Through his portraits and landscapes, his bestiary and his architectures, Xavier Veilhan (born 1963 in Lyon, lives and works in Paris) pursues a constantly regenerated reflection on the status of representation and the materialization of an idea, using the same space for sculpture, painting and photography. A manufacturer of the visible, he invents works, images, and objects that hesitate between the familiar and the strange. Interested in modernity and using references ranging from classical statuary to Futurism and Op art, Veilhan has been compared to artists such as Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. For Jean-Pierre Criqui he is "a perfect example of a Pop artist for the 21st century, with an accessible formal vocabulary and referents, while at the same time cultivating a certain air of detachment and reserve in his use of affects, thereby distancing himself from the empathy aroused by direct borrowings from the sphere of commodities and the media."
Edited by Maura Lucking and François Perrin.
Texts by Sarah Lorenzen, Franck Escher,
Claude Parent, Xavier Veilhan, Pedro Gadanho, Nicolas Godin, Ingrid Luquet-Gad, Jean-Louis Cohen, Jan Tumlir, François Perrin.
Graphic Design: Margo Graxeda.
Published by SPA Editions, Los Angeles (
www.totallyluxuryspa.com).
published in June 2015
English edition
25,4 x 26,7 cm (hardcover, cloth binding)
204 pages (color & duotone ill.)
ISBN : 978-0-9887634-6-3
EAN : 9780988763463
sold out
